Individual Project
TaskTrain
A productivity timer that visualises and simplifies work organisation, time management, and task visualisation.
Product Design
User Research
Software Engineering
Location /
Loughborough University
Role
Design Engineer
User Research, User Experience, Stakeholder Interviews, Design Development, Python Programming, Iterative Prototyping, User Testing
October 2021 - April 2022
Angeline has managed this project well and learned many lessons in the process. With personal health difficulties and complications of building a physical prototype, she had correctly identified these risks during the proposal and mitigated them by building in good slack.
There was also excellent user testing and some great engineering lessons learned, switching to software design when needed and building upon previous programming foundations to create a functional and very productive design output. Overall, there was clear evidence of a high level of initiative and independent thinking as she made sound decisions during tough calls.
— Ella-Mae Hubbard, Project Supervisor and Senior Lecturer in Systems Engineering
Overview
TaskTrain is a visual productivity timer that implements task visualisation, time progression, and break reminders, and includes the flexibility to change work-to-break ratios on the fly. Without the structure of home and school, university students with ADHD struggle to manage their productivity by themselves due to their executive dysfunction. To combat this, TaskTrain aims to provide enough stimulation through visual and auditory cues as to gamify and simplify work organisation and time management.
This was a 7-month individual project that was conducted alongside other modules, where I had to demonstrate both a user-centred research process and the application of engineering principles within my proposed solution.
Background Context
People with Attentive-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may require different strategies to cope with their executive dysfunction as ADHD presentation varies from individual to individual. Although there are existing products that help, most only target specific symptoms, like time blindness or performance evaluation, leaving people with ADHD with the need to employ a combination of tools to suit their working styles.
The Many Facets of Executive Function
As of recently, there has been a new influx of late-diagnosed adults due to better awareness and support. Without enough flexibility and customisability, current tools fail to address the lack of self-confidence and sense of control these adults often feel. There is a need to unlearn years of self-inflicted shame and unrealistic perfectionism, which requires long-term effort in figuring out what works for them.
The 'V' Diagram
My process was inspired by the V-Model, commonly used in systems engineering for the rigorous development of high-quality products, focusing on validating features to be user-centred and error-free.
In generating understanding and concepts on the left alongside validating these ideas and insights on the right side of the diagram, these provide continuity between the beginning and end of project development.
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Design. In this first phase, I identified user needs and discovered the problem context through user interviews, which allowed me to develop concepts that address those pain points. I then progressed to a chosen, detailed and specific product idea to proceed with through my research and analysis.
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Plan. This mid-point provided the time to re-evaluate how best to proceed with the resources available. I determined that creating a simulation worked better for user testing and developed a product design specification, double-checking it against the customer needs list.
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Test. This last phase entailed iterative prototyping of the simulation. While learning to code, I designed features that worked together to provide a holistic solution as a visual productivity timer. I then tested it with previously interviewed users to examine whether their experience was favourable.
Understanding User Behaviour
Designing for accessibility often makes lives more manageable for everyone, not just the targeted group. As receiving an ADHD diagnosis may take years from when university students first acknowledged their struggles, I didn't want to accidentally exclude insights by only targeting diagnosed individuals. I used an inclusion criteria based on the ASRS ADHD symptom checklist to screen for compatible participants.
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What Impacts Students' Productivity?
Once I gathered enough variety among my participants, I interviewed them within a semi-formal structure so that they could freely bring up any relevant experiences of interest. I then used thematic analysis to evaluate the information I attained, which helped me identify, analyse and interpret patterns of meaning within the qualitative data.
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From my analysis, three areas stood out to me:
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Overwhelming Negative Emotions. Participants stated that it was tough to begin tasks when they were unmotivated or lacking self-control, reporting feelings of incompetence, fear, stress, anxiety, and guilt when trying to start.
They also reported feeling unworthiness, perfectionism, disappointment, and frustration during and after tasks, especially when evaluating themselves.
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Environmental Cues For Sense-Making. As participants had varying levels of self-awareness and working memory, they used different strategies to resolve their struggles. Participants may sometimes be aware if they're spending too long on things and call for breaks, but many don't take breaks if they're on a productive flow as they fear breaking their momentum.
Thus, many don't plan for breaks and become unaware of the time they spend working. They need concrete and specific ways to identify a period or a piece of work, using the structure of other things, such as music playlists, to indicate time.
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Needing Structure but also Flexibility. It was difficult for participants to plan their days as there were too many factors to consider from previous experiences. Most try to have a set structure or plan to follow through with, but they can get carried away with their mental lists and magnify the tasks in their head.
They need flexible schedules that allow them to leave their work and prevent burnout.
“ I’m unable to do the things I want to do or do the things I’m supposed to know how to do. If you feel that you should be able to do something and you can’t, it takes a toll on your confidence.”
“(It) has certainly impacted my mental health and contributed to my depression and anxiety. It contributed to my imposter syndrome (as well)! It feels like I’ve not worked hard enough or that I’m constantly burned out — there’s no in-between.”
— Participant 6
“Sometimes I work for 7 hours without taking breaks if tasks are too important. For the most part, I will take a break every hour for 10 minutes, but I will still be in work mode and scroll through lectures. I try to take breaks to prevent burnout, but I can’t stop because of the stress the tasks induce.”
— Participant 2
“Planning doesn’t work out as I have different working capacities for different days. I never end up sticking to it. The tasks are daunting as I don’t know how long they will take, but structuring it to an hour would help start.”
— Participant 7
“I have a structure for the next day before bed where the whole day is set out. I have a rough idea of what I want to do so that I can be flexible, as missing tasks would cause me to be upset, so it’s rough. I set a time to wake up the night before, but I’ll shift my schedule if I wake up later. If it’s packed, I could forget tasks. In general, I’ll attempt to stick to schedule, but they aren’t related to a specific time.”
— Participant 2
Conceptualisation
What Can Be Done?
Using desk research to collate formal and informal strategies from research journals, ADHD coaches, and social media, I gained insight into how ADHD was understood and dealt with from different perspectives. These were the common links throughout:
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Providing Enough Stimulation. Lacking in dopamine, the ADHD brain 'chases' after for an increase in stimulation. As the mind becomes used to something, it dismisses 'static' items. To-do lists can blend into the background and be forgotten, stopping people from staying on track. Constantly changing things up can help alleviate this, which is why gamification works very well with people with ADHD.
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Making the Abstract Concrete. Using visual environmental cues provide tangibility to abstract concepts, such as tasks or the passing of time. Having physical objects to associate these concepts with provide clearer mental images when dealing with time blindness or poor working memory.
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Enabling a Sense of Control. When people with ADHD were given intervention and tools to increase their sense of control and self-confidence while doing tasks, it can empower them to make a positive change in their lives. This can be as simple as giving them control over the timer.
Ideation
To guide my ideation, I created a customer needs list and design intent to summarise user wants and pain points. These include needing to enforce habits and routines, creating visuals for self-evaluation, and strategies for concentration, working memory, time management, and motivation.
Design Intent: To develop a physical device that provides a reliable time and task visualisation and implement break reminders for short-term goals to improve their awareness of their progress, increasing their confidence and reducing task avoidance in the long term.
Providing familiar concepts can help improve a product's ease of use. My idea was inspired by the call buttons used in buses, which provide a system to signify when people want to get on or off, and by carriages on trains to signify the load they're taking on.
A physical product was chosen for easy interaction while providing enough moving parts and colours to keep users engaged without restricting access to users’ work devices. The space in the middle can allow users to pin up their schedules, task lists, calendars, and other planning systems.
Environmental Cues: The 'train' and the 'carriages' represent the user and tasks, and the 'stations' and lights on the board represent time increments and their respective statuses. With only three 'carriages' available, users would be constrained to encourage task breakdown for straightforward initiation. Audio prompts will also indicate what status is coming up, so the users will not need the timer to be in constant view.
Familiar Concepts: The product was developed to follow the widespread Pomodoro time management method for its base timing, broken into intervals of 25 minutes followed by a 5-minute break. A circular path was chosen to enforce clock imagery for the passage of time, reinforcing the mental image of current tasks in short-term memory.
Sense of Control: The buttons on the side control the timer and allow the user to switch between breaks and work, which changes the colour of the next light. This on-the-go adaptability is to provide more flexibility during work intervals.
The idea was then updated to consider the mechanisms and ergonomics required to provide suitable functionality and user experience.
Review & Planning
Due to having limited time for prototyping and testing, there was a choice between creating a functional prototype and performing a heuristic test or creating a simulated product to be user-tested. I chose user testing to obtain as much feedback as possible and decided to use a simulation to test this concept.
I interviewed the participants again, asking them to evaluate the concept and comment on what else they wanted. Wants with frequencies of 11 and 10 were already achieved by the current product concept, and the wants: “log durations of completed tasks”, “unfinished tasks to remain to the next day”, and “external motivator” were added. With these, I created a product design specification (PDS) to guide my prototyping.
Preparation for Simulation Design
I chose Codeskulptor, a browser-based Python development environment and GUI (Graphical User Interface), as testers can access it through their devices. It offers basic graphics which can simulate the track, the carriages, the lights, and the buttons. I then developed a flowchart sequence to showcase the user journey of using the device to aid my coding process.
I also developed a use-case diagram to visualise the user’s possible interactions with the system. This was used to understand which inputs were more significant, determining their size, placement, and colour.
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To make the simulation intuitive to the user, I built in affordance for the buttons. Users know the button functions from the shape and placement, and I also took extra care to map and bind keyboard controls accordingly.
Protoyping & Development
As a coding beginner, it was incredibly challenging to develop an optimised code for a working simulation within a short timeframe. While programming on Codeskulptor was straightforward, it does not support the more complex module operations commonly found on codes uploaded to Stack Overflow or GitHub. Thankfully, I was able to consult professionals, which aided my process greatly.
I found a timer code on SearchCode where it used “A”,” B”, “C”, and “D” variables to represent minutes, tens of seconds, seconds, and tenths of a second. As I wasn't familiar with the language and Codeskulptor, the error here was thinking that the only way to trigger the code was to base conditions off these specific numbers. I didn't realise that the timer code was based on Python’s in-built timer, which led to the first draft being built on many if statements and global variables with many repeat codes where I could have simplified it further. After the first draft, I realised this and promptly updated the code to make it cleaner. A 'Cycle Counter' was added at the end of the stop timer code to add up the number of cycles finished, which triggers a draw function for inputting red circles on the 'Number of Cycles' row of lights.
User Testing
I recruited the same participants again to test the simulation. They were tasked with preparing work (e.g., coursework, tutorial sheets, lecture notes) and break tasks (e.g., stretching, sketching, tea break) of their choosing. They were also given the choice to use a 15-minute or 30-minute timer based on their work schedules.
Feedback
The overall feedback was positive as each individual found that having specific features was helpful to their unique issues with productivity.
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Easy to Get Started. Most participants understood the instructions readily, and half didn’t have to refer to the instruction sheet while using the simulation. All participants found the layout of the buttons to be easily understandable and particularly enjoyed the ability to change the lights on the go.
“Changing the lights is easy if you have read the user guide. Having the option to change the lights whenever gives me more flexibility. It helped as sometimes I only realised I needed a break while doing the task. So being able to change it while the timer is running helps ease the stress of feeling like I have to keep working until the timer stops.”
— Participant 11
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Helpful Environmental Cues. All participants found that breaking their work into three smaller tasks helped with task initiation. They could determine the time passing and the number of jobs from seeing the carriages, although one found that looking at the clock timer was more helpful for them. All participants also found that the lights allowed them to understand the work-to-break ratio of their current session and that the audio cues helped reinforce that as many were looking away from the timer to do their work.
“I have trouble breaking down tasks into manageable pieces, but completing a cycle with the timer did help me learn that it was too large a task for the time given and (that) I need to get better at estimating time. Writing down the task I was about to do did help me stay focused on that task, though.”
— Participant 5
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Promotes Self-Awareness. All participants found the statistics page helpful as it helped give a sense of completion, motivate them for future tasks, and help them understand how long a task took for future work sessions.
“Yes, the statistics page was helpful. I liked to see how long it would take to do the tasks, which would benefit my efforts in future task planning.”
— Participant 1
Next Steps
The suggestions for improvement were all related to better aesthetics and user interface, as participants wished for more customisation to personalise their timers. Overall, this was a successful project that has discovered that addressing these symptoms would also benefit those who struggle with executive function in general, especially with mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and other comorbidities.
The device could also be altered for long-term tasks such as year-long projects, where it could be used for time awareness and work management of projects for individuals and among teams. These developed concepts could then be used to further research on promoting the use of productivity devices in a school, university, home, or work setting to provide accommodations for those who require it.
There is also a possibility of whether the visual representation of symptom-specific strategies would promote understanding and empathy from people around them, which could help people become more considerate of other’s working styles and paces.